The draft US defense budget for the 2027 fiscal year does not provide for funding for military aid to Ukraine under the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) program. This, UNIAN informs, became known during hearings in the US Senate Committee on Armed Forces. The PromPolitInform portal reports.
During the hearings, senators directly asked Pentagon representatives whether they understood correctly that the budget request for 2027 does not provide for funding for the USAI program (aid to Ukraine).
“Yes, that’s right. There is no USAI funding in this budget,” replied the acting chief financial officer of the US Department of Defense, Jules Gerst.
Reference. USAI is one of the key programs of American military support for Ukraine. It allows the Pentagon to order weapons and military equipment for the Armed Forces of Ukraine directly from manufacturers.
It is important to note that the Trump administration’s budget request for fiscal year 2027 provides for record defense spending – about $1.5 trillion. This is 50% more than in the current year.
At the moment, we are only talking about the administration’s budget request. The final decision will be made by the US Congress. The process of considering and approving the defense budget traditionally lasts several months, and the document itself may change significantly during its passage through the House of Representatives and the Senate. It is expected that the final version of the budget for fiscal year 2027 will be approved in the fall – before the start of the new fiscal year in the US, which starts on October 1.
US military aid to Ukraine
As we wrote, after the start of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, the US gradually increased military support for Kyiv. The main mechanism was the Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative (USAI) program, which has been in operation since 2016 and through which the Pentagon financed the training of the Ukrainian military, the purchase of equipment, communications equipment, radars, drones and other weapons. Before the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, the total amount of American military assistance to Ukraine was estimated at several billion dollars.
After the start of the great war in February 2022, the amount of US assistance to Ukraine increased many times. Under the Joe Biden administration, the total amount of US military assistance to Ukraine under various programs exceeded $ 60 billion.
However, after Trump returned to the White House in 2025, Washington actually stopped allocating new packages of free military assistance, but continued to supply weapons under the already approved packages of the Biden era. At the insistence of the Democrats, it was possible to include meager amounts of aid to Ukraine in the 2025 and 2026 US budgets at the level of several hundred million dollars.
Thus, 2027 may be the first year since 2016 when the US will not provide direct free military assistance to Ukraine.
